Archive for January 26th, 2011

Sara B. is losing her cool. Not just in the momentary-meltdown kind of way - though there’s that, too. At the helm of must-read Snap magazine, veteran style guru Sara B. has had the job - and joy - for the past fifteen years of eviscerating the city’s fashion victims in her legendary Dos and Don’ts photo spread. But now on the un-hip edge of forty, with ambitious hipster kids reinventing the style world, Sara’s being spit out like an old Polaroid picture: blurry, undeveloped and obsolete.

Fueled by alcohol, nicotine and self-loathing, Sara launches into a cringeworthy but often comic series of blowups - personal, professional and private - that culminate in an epiphany. That she, the arbiter of taste, has made her living by cutting people down…and somehow she’s got to make amends.

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A while back Danielle, during American Saturday, posted about Aimee Bender’s new novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. I thought it sounded absolutely amazing so I was thrilled to see that it will be released in the UK on 3rd February 2011 and it’s one I would really love to read. Here’s the synopsis:

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the slice. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother – her cheerful, can-do mother – tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes perilous. Anything can be revealed at any meal.

Rose’s gift forces her to confront the secret knowledge all families keep hidden – truths about her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s strange detachment and her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up, she realises there are some secrets that even her taste buds cannot discern.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the heartbreak of loving those whom you know too much about. It is profound and funny, wise and sad, and Aimee Bender’s dazzling prose illuminates the strangeness of everyday life.